Chasing Nuts

It is only Wednesday and it sure has been an exciting week for me.  I am going to be speaking at two great Tech events about PostgreSQL.  My friends over at e-Mol are lining up eager customers for their amazing product. Lastly, I just had an interview with a really great company that went very well.
I have been evangelizing about PostgreSQL every chance I have for years.  Mostly I spend my energy evangelizing locally, local LUG or MUG meetings and of course Penguicon.  From time to time I get the wonderful opportunity to speak about PostgreSQL  at a tech event more than a simple car drive away.  I recently found out that I am traveling and speaking at TWO great Tech events!  First I will be speaking at PGCon 2008 coming this May 22-23 at University of Ottawa.  Next I will be flying the other side of the continent and presenting at OSCON 2008 happening July 21-25 in Portland Oregon.  It will be my first time to a PostgreSQL only event and I am looking forward to learning lots from the other people there.  I will be presenting at OSCON for my second time and there too I will be sucking up information and knowledge like a sponge.
At both events my presentation will be “This is your PostgreSQL on drugs”.

PostgreSQL is known to be a powerful open source relational database with many uses. One such use is warehousing EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) from oncology practices across the country. PostgreSQL, Perl, Apache, Ubuntu Linux and OpenBSD are all used for their strengths to deliver information to pharmaceutical companies to see what their drugs are doing for individuals in real world scenarios. Do you have a large amount of data that needs to be searchable, aggregated and extremely secure at the same time? See many of the creative solutions that have been deployed to help facilitate how we put PostgreSQL to the task of drugs.

The talk is mainly about what my genius friend Brian has been building, with a bit of help from yours truly, for the last year: a simple way to manage and data mine medical records for HUGE numbers of people.  The end goal is to make healthcare better for everyone and the best part is that this week he has two large customers clamoring to work with him!
If all that was not enough to make excited I just finished an interview that went very well.  I have to say that I am not a huge fan of formal interviews.  You know the ones, where they ask you to explain a time when you worked in a group and there was a conflict and you helped resolve it.  My interview today was with people high up but was more of a conversation.  They asked some questions, we talked about some things and then I asked some questions.  I feel it went well and I think I will be seeing them again the next round of speaking with the company.

With all that has been going well I think it is time to run out and buy a lotto ticket.

For those that may not have known, I was not as happy as I could have been at my work situation the last few months.  That is the reason I am leaving my position at Autoweb Communications in two weeks.  I did tell my managers at the company a few weeks ago however my last two weeks starts this Monday.  Working for Autoweb has been a wonderful experience. I have grown there in many ways and will always remember the opportunities provided for me by Autoweb.

What may seem a little unusual is that I am leaving Autoweb without a new job all lined up.  Part of the reason is that I do not feel it would be totally fair to be working for one company while taking time and energy to look for another position; perhaps I am too nice a guy.  Fortunately I have been very diligent at saving up money and know that I am well prepared to deal with any gap in employment that I will have.  The great news is that in the few short days that I have been talking to people about looking for a new position many amazing and exciting opportunities have fallen in my lap.

I am a little scared but more excited than anything about this next chapter in my life.

Last weekend I decided to spend some time in the kitchen baking with my crappy oven and made a four layer German Chocolate Cake. 

I do most all my baking with directions from Cooks Illustrated and if you are up for the work, as a Cooks Illustrated recipes are work, you must try their  German Chocolate Cake with Coconut-Pecan Filling.  It was pretty much heaven on a plate.

I just about laughed so hard I  was crying this morning when I saw a hilarious look at how rumors get started for new Apple Products.  If you do not have a sense of humor and/or are a huge Mac zealot you may not want to read it.   Some great quotes for those to lazy to read the whole thing:

• “Will it work with my ten-year-old Quadra 840AV running Mac OS 8.1?”
• “underemployed web designers and independent musicians struggle to clear credit card space.”
• ““Will it play multiplexed Ogg Vorbis streams?” become matters of life and death.”
• “Business Week publishes an article stating that unless Apple immediately releases a Windows version of the new product its market share will continue to shrink and Apple will be out of business within six months.”

I took a little time today and upgraded my WordPress install to version 2.3.3. Though some mistakes are just too much fun to make only once I managed to upgrade the site without taking it down this time.

On another note I will be talking about my favorite database PostgreSQL tomorrow at MUG. I plan to talk about the histroy of the project and then get into all the super hot new features. After that I will also shamelessly plug Penguicon.